Life Without Objection

            Have you had moments when you’ve wondered why you were even on the planet, what between personal pain, stress, powerlessness, and the general insane state of the world?  Consider the lives of Francisco and Wu, who’ve been around for over 200 years.

            When Wu left China in 1859, up to thirty million of his countrymen were dying around him as a result of the Taiping Rebellion and the Opium Wars with the British.  Francisco watched his wife and son die in the Great Dying of 1833 when up to two-thirds of all the Yokuts in Central California died of disease, this after escaping from the mission where he’d been taken when he was kidnapped by the Spanish cavalry.  It would be easy to fall into a pit of helpless despair in the face of such circumstances. 

            Somehow the lives of these two men have gone on and on, but is this a blessing or a curse?  How would your mind handle having that amount of time to dwell on the insults and tragedies of life? 

            Wu says that you have to give up all your objections to being alive in order to understand what it means to be a full human being and understand why you’re on the planet.  It’s understandable, even if it can’t be fully explained.  He says we have to allow pain to just be pain, without using it as a reason to object to life.  The mountains and rivers of the southern Sierra Nevada absorb Francisco’s and Wu’s pain and help them to live without objection.